Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Community Helpers and Labor Day in the Primary Classroom

Teaching Labor Day is very beneficial in the primary classroom because it starts giving your students an early appreciation of community helpers and workers! I've always taught my community helpers unit around Labor Day so that we can tie them in together.Sometimes, Labor Day gets skipped over during the month of September because of how busy curriculum starts off. If there is any freedom in your curriculum, it's a great holiday to incorporate. Reading, social studies, speaking and listening, and more!

Here are a few ideas to incorporate Labor Day into your primary classroom!

1. Host a Career Day

-Invite parents or other student family members to come into your classroom to chat about their jobs. One year, my grade level invited six people to come and the classes rotated through each room. The six helpers talked for about 10 minutes, then did a little activity for their career with each class.

-Community Helper and Labor Day go hand in hand. This is when I have always taught my community helper units. I tried to make the unit cross-curricular, so we incorporated them in our math, in our reading centers, and into our content lessons.

Make an anchor chart like Life in First Grade did that lists community helpers A-Z for your students. You can also set up a photo booth for your students like Primary Punch did. This will help students already start thinking about their future.

These two flip books are also in my TPT store.
They both have a reading passage with comprehension questions, then a sorting activity and a final writing piece. Check those out here.
Click here for Community Helper Flip Book.
Click here for Labor Day Flip Book.

3. Back to Basics: Reading and Social Studies

-If you only have one or two days to teach Labor Day and can't afford to give up the week to do community helpers unit, teach the nonfiction meaning behind Labor Day.

Head to your local library to stock up on community helper and Labor Day read aloud books to either read aloud or add to your classroom library.

On the left, you will see a nonfiction passage with comprehension activities. Then on the left, you have a fictional passage on children in a classroom working on a Labor Day project. There are also two pages that will compare and contrast the Labor Day passages.
If you're not working in interactive notebooks, look below for the traditional passages to print on printer paper!

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